Mesh

I have been looking at this for about a week now and want to build about a dozen of these over the next 3 months. My only real question is do they mesh? thats something im not really sure. I know nothing about coding but I really love this tech.

Introduction.

I guess I should probably introduce myself. I am a member of the Free State Project and am interested in PirateBoxes and mesh techonology as a form of activism. There are a few Ideas that I have and would really like to work them out. One of the reasons why I see Mesh as vital is of course because once it is established its almost impossible to take down. Eventually what I would like to see is the PirateBox turn into distrubited MeshBoxes, dedicated stand alone units with no other purpose other than to store and distrubte data. This eventually would mean an operating system which could measure duplicate files and add and remove files from the mexhbox net. In practice this would prevent over saturation of a particular file and it would also make it impossible for governments and other agencies to remove files because the system would duplicate them onto other boxes as fast as they could be deleted.

Hi,
have a look at that wiki page I just started to write down (already took me around 45 Minutes to collect & write down everythin).

piratebox.aod-rpg.de - Mesh introduction[/ur]

I hope this answers a few questions, and I'm going to write more later....

Matthias

I think for mesh networks we are going to need better router gear
Routers with 3x DUAL BAND 802.11ac Wi Fi Radio chipsets and 3x Antenna

[www.amazon.co.uk]
Even Hak 5 covered it this week
[www.youtube.com]

These routers with a little creatively are checking all the boxes of becoming the new next generation of advanced easly customizable pirate boxes to suite anyones budgets and offer upgrades paths where people can add to them and make a number of sweet custom and powerful setups. And can flexibly adapt for any purpose. (Long distance Mesh Super Node Relays)

Them 4x LAN Gigabit ports Means Advanced Expansion
- Dedicated servers so the router can remain focused on just dealing with Network / mesh stuff
Dedicated servers can offer better protocols that can better deal the lacks and limitations I would suggest using Bit-Torrent / Gnutella, Gnutella2 (G2), even a p2p-ODDNS: Decentralized and Open DNS
[torrentfreak.com] (using PHP & Mysql)
> after all we have the Raspberry Pi now So it can run these things better than the router would and if not then we can up it to Mini ITX, > Micro ATX … all the way up to full industry server gear

- Extra ADD SLAVE Routers to cover the WiFi in other Wifi Channels and bands
(Allows piratebox router to be still be seen even if there channel interference - even redundancy in more than one way - extra bandwidth and client capacity)

We can call the old piratebox TP-Link TL-MR3020
[Pirate box - 150Mbps Value level Edition]
[Pirate box - 150Mbps Value level Mesh Edition]

and call the Asus-RT-AC66U and others 802.11ac routers like it
[Pirate box - 1000Mbps Dual Band Advanced Level Edition]
[Pirate box - 1000Mbps Dual Band Advanced Level Mesh Edition]

This thing has currently no OpenWRT support.
But it is very expensive and the most PirateBox-user are very price sensitive.

Yes, a dual-wifi card router would be the best option.. a cheaper version which might be useful is "Buffalo WZR-HP-AG 300h"
But the problem is, in the most cases the 2nd device is only a 5GHZ card... and using 5GHZ for AP is a problem, because the most device can only use 2.5GHZ
And if your mesh-partner understand 2.5GHZ only you are very lonely ...


We are currently working on improvements on this concept.

Hi all,

Isn't it a good solution to use qaul.net project to create the mesh network ? Here is their presentation :

Quote

qaul.net implements a redundant, open communication principle, in which wireless-enabled computers and mobile devices can directly form a spontaneous network. Text messaging, file sharing and voice calls are possible independent of internet and cellular networks. Qaul.net can spread like a virus, and an Open Source Community can modify it freely.

They have a dedicated development for openwrt here and so can probably be installed as part of the pirate box.

my 2 cents

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Kripskroll

Had a short look at this project. I'm not really sure what they are doing.

I read they are using olsrd instead of BATMAN-advanced. It is alot more configuration and we still have the same issues:

* Only one wifi-card providing mesh & AP mode
* even worse IP setup
* more protocoll overhead

The only new functionality, which would help is the hostname resolution thing... that's all

Or did I get it wrong?



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/28/2013 06:42AM by Matthias.

Matthias,

Agreed for most of the assertion except perhaps for protocol overhead. Is it considering olsr performance worst than BATMAN ? If this is for this reason, not sure we lose so much considering olsr performance see here

Yes, I read a few of these articles. I was not able to open the linked one (where is the download?) - I read i.e. An experimental comparison of routing protocols in multi hop ad hoc networks.
The gap is not so big comparing to the gap between BATMAN and babeld.

But I still can't see the point to exchange the protocol to something different. Can you say me 3 good reasons to switch?
I digged into the oslr configuration (again) and it is very complicated compared to the one of batman-adv (nearly none).

what do you think- how many time it will take to adapt the oslrd package to the piratebox net-configuration?

edit: (not ironic, just want to know... )



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/28/2013 09:35AM by Matthias.

You are probably far more experienced than me to answer.
This was just an idea and I understand it is too much effort to adapt.

Thanks a lot for your anwers and feedback. Appreciate a lot.

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Kripskroll

BTW: I contacted the authors

Hi,

What about an app that creates a kind of an offline-cloud based on smartphones? Something like Tahoe-Lafs for smartphones, a local virtual harddisk drive. I don´t know if something like this has already be mentioned in this forum, so I just wrote this here. Just a suggestion.

I haven´t build a PirateBox yet, but I tried converting my smartphone into one. There is still a problem with network setup, maybe it works some day with the next release(s).

PirateBox is a great idea, keep up the good work.

Any more developement on this. I would like to demo a mesh network to a boy scout team when they are camping in the mountains. Can someone give me some directions? Imaging a boy scout troup with PirateBoxes!

iamanoob Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Any more developement on this. I would like to
> demo a mesh network to a boy scout team when they
> are camping in the mountains. Can someone give me
> some directions? Imaging a boy scout troup with
> PirateBoxes!

Ditto.

I'm thinking devices like this might be great for establishing some emergency communications during a disaster. (e.g. when the internet, cell, and phone lines are down)

I'm not looking for high-bandwidth capabilities.... just something that can move things like simple text files (email) around. Even store-and-forward capabilities would be fantastic. (e.g. collect email messages from one devastated town, then carry device to another town to forward them on the internet.)

Mattias, have you maybe tried (for the Raspberry(Pi)rate box) something like olsrd for routint with an ad-hoc WiFi setup and using Syncthing as the sync platform. This could create a quite nice mesh setup with data mirroring.

olsr is a bit a different aproach then we use on piratebox and.. a bit more difficult.

The advantage of batman-adv is that we have a normal broadcasting network without additional Layer3 routing ontop. That would be required for OLSR

Syncthing is a good opportunity for RPis and in a *managed* environment, as the nodes - AFAIK - does not accept themself completely automatic.

Would be a good Proof of concept.

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This is only my signature.

AFAIK the only mesh protocol that works on layer2 is batman-adv, the other all work in layer3 (olsdr, batmad, etc, etc)

One of the things I love about batman-adv mesh and what I have played more around is the network-coding feature:

[www.open-mesh.org]

This helps saving quite some airtime and as I was using foneras with additional cheap wireless usb cards this helped quite a lot as it didn't need more expensive hardware.

Major problem may be to set the wireless card to work as an ap at the same as connected to the mesh, I think some cards support the creation of virtual interfaces each of them in one mode, but no sure if that would be the case with the ones included on the MR3020 for example.

Quote

Major problem may be to set the wireless card to work as an ap at the same as connected to the mesh, I think some cards support the creation of virtual interfaces each of them in one mode, but no sure if that would be the case with the ones included on the MR3020 for example.

Nearly every ar71xx chipset is able to do this, even some USB sticks. no problem.
The problem starts with transfer speed.

For the other stuff, checkout my answer in this thread [forum.piratebox.cc]

Matthias

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This is only my signature.